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Let's Do What We Can!

This is Reverend David's March article in our monthly newsletter, CONTACT. His message remind each of us to not be overwhelmed but to keep our focus on what we can do to fight for justice.

“Don’t let the everything that you can’t do keep you from the something that you can.”
I keep returning to this theme because it isn’t easy to remember. Our culture says everything is up to you all by yourself, and everything is the result of individual choices. Everything comes down to your personal guilt and responsibility -- and you should do everything you can to minimize it.
So you get paralyzed, or overwhelmed, or numb, and let go of a commitment to change the world for the better. But all that inward-looking keeps us from seeing the scale of the effort underway, keep us from appreciating all the groups and teams fighting for justice.
Our task is to stay focused: what's incumbent on each of us is not to do everything but to do something.
“Do not be conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds,” writes the Apostle Paul to the early church -- which was still an underground church, an illegal church, a church whose people had to live inside empire: a community of resistance which called its people to hope in a time of despair.
“Do not be conformed to the world,” this may be the most dangerous verse in the Bible, suggests Rev. Robin Meyers, because conformity is what comes naturally to us: there no other verse which so upsets the status quo.
Nearly two thousand years later, our theology may be very different, but we are like those early Christians, gathering to keep their identity and keep their moral commitments intact while living in empire.
So that, when the days come, when we are asked to be complicit in the unconscionable, we can say no.
The poet Charles Bukowski charges us this:
your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you
In Hope,
Rev. David"

Buddhist Meditation

Reverend Marcia Curtis is temporarily canceling the Sunday evening meditation until further notice. For more information please clickredlotussangha.org. We hope to resume the meditation and dharma talks in the next few weeks.